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THE FIRST PRINTING
Of all the reasons someone would want to go to Harvard, morbid curiosity is a rare one. Back in early 2015, I headed to Harvard’s Houghton Library to see what was then the only scientifically verified anthropodermic book. Coming from a working-class background, I was astounded that simply because I was library faculty at a major research university, I could write to another university and say, “I would like to see your human skin book, please,” and they would say, “Certainly, come on over.” I was determined to put that extraordinary privilege to use at every opportunity. While most people scuttle with their heads down through Harvard Yard in the blustery spring winds, I am always that person lingering near the sundial that reads, “On this moment hangs eternity,” my starry-eyed expression giving me away as a hopeless history nerd who is just supremely happy to get to be there.
Once inside Houghton’s reading room, I removed my mittens, blew on my hands, and took Arsène Houssaye’s Des destinées de l’ame (Destinies of the Soul) from its cradle. The outside was a mottled leather with large, visible pores. Inside, the book’s endpapers were decorated with jaunty, brightly colored Ls and Bs (presumably the initials of its former owner, Dr. Ludovic Bouland), and two symbols associated with France and the medical profession, respectively—the fleur-de-lis and the staff of Asclepius (a snake wrapped around a rod). When I opened its pages, I read a dedication that I found unexpectedly heart-wrenching for a human skin book.
I translated it from the French as follows:
I dedicate this book,
to you
who has been the soul of this house,
who calls to me in the house of God,
who has left before me
to make me love the path to death,
you whose memory is sweet
like the perfume from rivers of regret
you who put children in this house,
you who will never return
but always have your place in this house,
you who have been
muse, wife, and mother
with the three beauties
grace, love, and virtue;
to you
whom I have loved, whom I love, whom I will love.
By the 1880s, the elderly author Arsène Houssaye had turned his attention away from the drama, satire, and art criticism that had marked his writing career to ruminate on the soul, and what happens to people such as his beloved wife when their souls escape this world. Beset by grief, he delved into the philosophic, scientific, poetic, and occult conceptions of the soul, and mused about its immortality in Des destinées de l’ame.
He gave a copy of the work to his bibliophile friend Ludovic Bouland. Dr. Bouland had been holding on to a piece of skin from a woman’s back for some years and decided it would be put to good use as a covering for his brokenhearted friend’s new book. “If you look attentively you can easily distinguish the pores of the skin,” Bouland marveled in a handwritten note in the front of Des destinées de l’ame, where its lower quality, acidic paper burned a ghostly, reverse negative image of the note on the facing page. “A book on the human soul merits that it be given human clothing.”
At the Houghton Library, I held this clothing—in my bare hands, I might add. The number one question put to librarians who handle rare books is, “What, no gloves?” Wearing gloves to handle rare books actually makes you more likely to rip a page. Unless you’re handling old photos on which you might leave a permanent fingerprint or touching an object that could physically harm you (and in my career, those instances do arise—thinking of you, frontier-era dental kit full of mercury and who knows what else), it is best to simply wash and dry your hands frequently when looking through rare books. Gloves are for photos—either handling them, or posing for one in which wearing the gloves makes you look like a Very Serious Researcher.
The copy of Des destinées de l’ame in my hands doesn’t look much different from other leather-bound books of its era, except it’s a bit simpler in design. Before peptide mass fingerprinting, studying the follicle patterns on the leather served as the most common method for identifying which animal supplied a book’s leather. Rare book sellers still apply this method to discern the leather’s animal of origin when describing books for sale. The idea is that the arrangements of human hair follicles differ from that of a cow or pig; some conservation labs put high-powered microscopes to use for this purpose. This method works for most common uses, but follicle patterns can be unreliable. During the tanning process, leather stretches and warps in unpredictable ways, so discerning a triangle pattern from a diamond shape can be rather subjective. Age can also wear away the follicle patterns. The consequences are minimal if a book dealer mistakes Morocco leather for calf. But the change in stakes and price between an animal leather book and a human leather one is substantial.
In 2014, Harvard Library had PMF tested three books from three different library locations to find out if they were human. Des destinées de l’ame was determined to be genuine human skin; two other alleged anthropodermic books were determined to be bound in sheepskin. One, Juan Gutiérrez’s 1605 publication Practicarum quaestionum circa leges regias Hispaniae (loosely: Practical Questions on the Laws of Spain), was normally housed in the Harvard Law School Library, but when I visited, it was in the conservation department being repaired, so I couldn’t see it. Instead, I went to the medical library to see the other fake.
When I arrived at the Countway Library of Medicine, the attendant at the rare book room desk said those magic words every researcher loves to hear: “Jack told me to tell you that he pulled a couple of surprises for you.” She meant the librarian Jack Eckert, whom I had come to visit. She shuffled back to the shelf of requested materials and read aloud from the envelope. “Tattoo on human skin…” Her smile melted into a grimace.
I chuckled nervously. “You’re probably thinking, ‘What is this lady getting me into this morning?’”
“Never a dull moment,” she sighed, handing me the heavy plain white envelope.
People tend to think librarians sit around reading books all day. If only. In some circumstances, the job can be surprisingly dangerous. I once had a run-in with a donated box of rare medical materials at my own library. I pawed around some wadded-up brown paper surrounding the mystery items in the box and felt a sharp prick on my finger. As a small globule of blood began to form, I used my other hand to uncover the offending object. It was a small hinged metal box, not unlike an Altoids tin, a travel-size doctor’s kit from around 1900. I opened it to reveal, to my horror, the jagged remnants of broken glass vials of scary substances like strychnine and morphine. It also had a needle—previously covered in God-knows-what from God-knows-when—that had come loose and stabbed me. I sat in my sad basement office, watching my life flash before my eyes. “Is this seriously how I go out?” I wondered, as I breathed purposefully to stave off hyperventilation. I survived having learned a valuable life lesson: never stick your hand somewhere you can’t see.
So there I was at Countway, trying to free this mystery object from its envelope without digging for it blindly. Eventually the contents landed in my palm. The specimen had come apart from its cardboard backing; a centuries-old, tanned piece of skin was now touching my own. Inked into it was a tattoo depicting Jesus on the cross surrounded by other people. The follicles were prominent and it was brittle like a stale cracker. The back of the skin revealed brown swirls—as if Vincent van Gogh had gone through a scatological period—probably from glue that once held it to its cardboard backing. Now, I revel in my privilege to see amazing rare objects, to touch and smell history firsthand. But make no mistake: sometimes this work is creepy. I have a higher threshold for this stuff than a lot of people, but I am not immune.
I placed the tattooed skin back in its envelope and handed it back to the librarian. “Well, that was gross, even for me.”
“Do I want to see it?” the librarian asked, and we simultaneously shook our heads. “Just a few more things were pulled for you … Oh, more human skin!” She feigned excitement and produced a file folder with another white envelope inside. An accompanying paper read, “Human Skin Tanned. White man’s skin tanned and also colored man’s skin tanned at Mullen’s Tannery, North Cambridge, in 1882.” But I only saw one skin specimen. It was far thicker than the previous one and had a disturbing hole. Later I would realize that hole was probably a former belly button. It hadn’t crossed my jet-lagged mind when I came to Cambridge that my research might put me off my lunch. My stomach churned. Eckert was right, though: they certainly were surprises.
I met up with him later to discuss the collection. Countway had a sixteenth-century copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, alleged for centuries to be bound in human skin until scientific testing revealed it to be sheepskin. “The analyses done here make me think that there are probably far fewer human skin bindings than originally thought,” Eckert said. He had stumbled on anthropodermic bibliopegy in the same place I had; he worked at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia before coming to Harvard. When he heard his new workplace had an alleged human skin book, he was intrigued, but as librarians have thousands of special titles in their library to manage, he didn’t give the matter too much thought. He’d occasionally bring out the book to show to the curious, but as time went by he developed a hunch that it might not be real. When Harvard Library’s preservation center wanted to test the Ovid along with Harvard’s other two alleged human skin books, he jumped at the chance to know the truth. “Ovid’s Metamorphoses is all about people changing into other things, so someone changing into a book, I thought, this would be ideal.” Once the truth was revealed, the Countway’s copy of the Metamorphoses suddenly made less sense as part of a medical collection; the scientific findings changed the justification for the book’s place within the library.
Upon seeing the book myself, I understood how one might think it was real. Like a lot of other alleged anthropo- dermic books, this one was small—about the size of my mobile phone—and the leather on the outside had very visible follicles where the hair used to grow out of the skin. Inside the front cover is a red leather bookplate adorned with a golden axe but no names or mottoes. Underneath, someone had written “bound in human skin” in pencil. Who? you might ask. It could have been anyone who encountered the book over its hundreds of years of existence—a former owner, a binder, a bookseller, a librarian. A note like this was once usually enough to convince people; with no way of being tested, a shocking claim like this tended to be taken at face value. Whatever the motivation, the act of writing “bound in human skin” inside a book placed it in the realm of anthropodermic bibliopegy and rendered it an especially unusual copy. Few things increase a book’s value like scarcity.
The Metamorphoses seemingly had one big strike against its potential authenticity as a human skin book: its age. Untested examples with the most credible supporting historical evidence date from the late eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries. This Ovid from 1597 would seem to be too old. But before books became mechanically produced in the nineteenth century, buyers either bought a text block (the stacked and fastened pages in order, but without a cover) from the printer and then took the interior to a binder, or a bookseller would take the risk of binding text blocks and offering them for sale in his shop. It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that books would start coming from the publisher in the standardized, completed form of a bound hardcover that we would recognize today. The old method rendered most antiquarian books unique artifacts.
These books were resold and rebound with abandon—sometimes to personalize a book for a new owner’s aesthetic tastes, sometimes to put multiple works together into one volume or take them apart. Rebinding was especially popular for nineteenth-century collectors of older rare books, so even a very old book printed before the known era of anthropodermic bibliopegy could be a human skin book, if it were rebound in the nineteenth century. Flipping through Countway’s copy of the Metamorphoses, I noticed that some of the printed marginalia on the sides of the page were cut off, a telltale sign that it had been rebound at least once.
After years of believing that the Ovid book had this unusual distinction, some of Countway’s staff were disappointed to learn that the book’s binding wasn’t of human origin. But Eckert was glad to have an answer. He was also not a little relieved to avoid the controversy that his Houghton colleagues faced over their real human skin book, Des destinées de l’ame. “The latest upheavals following the Houghton book—someone wanted to inter it; I just found that insane! Where would you stop?” Eckert was accustomed to working in medical collections that housed human remains, and shared my concerns about calls for the destruction of an artifact when so much about its individual history is unknown.
In 2014, the usually sleepy blog for Harvard University’s Houghton Library announced the PMF test results of their three alleged anthropodermic books, prompting dozens of comments like these: “This book should be buried as a sign of respect for the poor patient whose body was profaned by a crazy doctor!” and “The binding is a macabre disgrace from a time when the human dignity of the mentally ill and others was readily discounted. Got any vintage WWII lampshades, Harvard?” The librarians must have been alarmed by the sudden negative attention. The announcement, then titled “Caveat Lecter,” began, “Good news for fans of anthropodermic bibliopegy, bibliomaniacs and cannibals alike: tests have revealed that Houghton Library’s copy of Arsène Houssaye’s Des destinées de l’ame … is without a doubt bound in human skin.” With this post, Harvard unintentionally brought a taboo kind of rare book into the public eye. Books bound in human skin were no longer a macabre rumor mentioned by student guides on campus tours; at least one had been confirmed as scientific fact.
Those bibliomaniacs and fans of anthropodermic bibliopegy were no doubt fascinated by Harvard’s findings. Along with curiosity seekers came readers shocked both by the practice and the fact that Harvard would own such nasty things. Paul Needham, a rare book librarian at Princeton, stated that not only was the tone of the blog post “shocking in its crudity” but that the only ethical thing to do, now that the book’s binding was confirmed as human, was to remove the cover and bury it. He succeeded in getting Harvard to take down the offending title and first line of the blog post, but no one interred or cremated the binding. Needham, the most vociferous voice from within the rare book world for the binding’s destruction, aired his thoughts on his website and various mailing lists: “Although preservation is a central responsibility of libraries and museums, it is not one isolated from wider questions of ethics. There are times when the ‘good’ of preservation must be weighed against other compelling responsibilities.”
Needham argued that Des destinées de l’ame had no research value, and furthermore, that the motivations of Ludovic Bouland, who had the book bound, were practically necrophilic: “A reader of Bouland’s notes accompanying his human-skin volumes cannot miss that it was significant to Bouland that he had exerted his power upon a woman. The skin of a male would not have fulfilled his psychosexual needs in the same way. Essentially, he carried out an act of post-mortem rape.”
To me, this line of thinking rings as anathema to a central tenet of what we librarians believe: we are stewards of the books in our care, especially when those books contain unpopular ideas, and we must do all we can to preserve and protect them. Though I have great professional admiration for Needham as a binding and rare book expert, I could not agree with what he asserted should be the destiny of Des destinées de l’ame. Like Eckert, I found it a step too far to ascribe sexual motivations to Bouland without any historical documentation.
While Needham was certainly within his right to voice his disgust at the existence of the book, I did not see why that should entitle him to call for its dismantling, thereby depriving researchers (like myself) of the ability to study it in the future. Artifacts of abominable acts have research value. I wanted to have a conversation with him to hear his full arguments, but first, I wanted to learn as much about the book as I could, starting with the man who tested it.
* * *
A SUCCESSFUL CHEMIST with stints at some big pharmaceutical companies and thirty years at IBM behind him, Daniel Kirby had begun to lose his passion for the work he was doing. Then one day, in 2003, he dropped everything to take a bike ride around the world. He started off with four strangers in Los Angeles, riding through New Zealand, across China, Southeast Asia, Europe, South Africa, and finally to South America, hopping on planes whenever oceans got in the way. Covering an average of sixty-one miles per day throughout the year, Kirby had a lot of time to think over what he wanted from his life and career. When he returned, his pharmaceutical work had lost some of its luster. “I really don’t want to go back to doing that analytical work where you get an answer and throw it over the wall,” Kirby said. “You have no idea what it’s connected to.” He wanted to feel excited about science again and see the full impact that his work could make.
Kirby thought his analytical chemistry skills might be usefully applied in museum conservation; if museums knew for sure what an art piece or artifact was made from, they would know better how to restore and protect it. Using well-established techniques from the field of proteomics (the study of proteins), Kirby could analyze the proteins in a piece of art to distinguish whether a painting’s egg tempera paint contained egg yolk, egg white, or a mixture of both, and whether it came from a chicken or a duck. He analyzed indigenous Alaskan objects at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, and discovered that a nineteenth-century Yup’ik kayak was stitched together with caribou and made from the skin of an earless seal (Phocidae family) and not the Steller’s sea lion (Otariidae family) as previously thought, thus equipping the indigenous Alaskans who continue to make these vessels with better historical information about how their ancestors created them.
He knew that this was just the beginning of the work he could do. He and his colleague Bill Lane started identifying parchment for the Harvard conservator Alan Puglia—a seventh-century Coptic codex here, a tenth-century Koran there. When Puglia asked whether this method could be used on Harvard’s three suspected cases of anthropodermic bibliopegy, Daniel Kirby found himself in the business of human skin book identification.
I met Kirby at Harvard’s extensive Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics Resource Laboratory, where the other researchers greeted him over the din of lab equipment. He said his goal was to teach those working in museum and library conservation labs to perform peptide mass fingerprinting tests using affordable desktop machines. “I’ve taught thirty to forty people to do it already,” he said. The low cost of Kirby’s method and its ability to be performed by nonscientists were also appealing to conservators.
Given the perks of PMF, Kirby could easily test his way through the world’s alleged anthropodermic books, sorting them into piles marked “human” and “nonhuman,” right? Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple. One obstacle was identifying where these books were held, and successfully convincing libraries and museums that the tests were worthwhile. It’s easy to imagine why a library might be a little reticent if they received an e-mail from a random scientist asking to test samples from their most controversial collection items. I could tell his goals were pure; he wanted to undertake a previously unexplored scientific pursuit and use his expertise to help libraries and museums learn about their collections. And it occurred to me that my own expertise could be of use: I knew many of the stewards of these collections personally; I spoke their language and understood their concerns. I decided I wanted to help.
Kirby and I compared notes on locations of alleged anthropodermic books from literature searches and word of mouth. I created a private database with information about the books, including test results, data-sharing agreements with the institutions, and photos. I set up a public website where we now receive tips and testing inquiries regularly, often from surprising places. In addition to this functional work, I also wanted to restore the books’ lost histories, their contexts. I needed to visit the books and dig into their provenances.
When possible, museums provide extensive information alongside exhibitions that include human remains, such as what area of the world they came from and the approximate period of death. Accompanying cultural artifacts may tie the remains to a certain tribe or religion. Meanwhile, books bound in human skin have stripped the bodies of their context, and physically and chemically transformed the raw materials of a human being into an object. The current science can’t provide evidence that would support returning books to a given cultural group or family. Even viable DNA testing couldn’t tell us the race of the person who contributed to an individual binding; despite common perceptions deriving from DNA ancestry kits, there are no genetic biological distinctions among races, which are an entirely social construct. According to the biologist Joseph L. Graves, “The modern consensus of evolutionary biologists is that our species does not have enough genetic variability among its populations to justify either the identification of geographically based races or of evolutionarily distinct lineages.” DNA ancestry tests merely estimate the evolutionarily recent continental origin of some segments of an individual’s DNA.
To learn about the people whose bodies make up these books, we must rely on the stories that accompany the objects through the decades, allowing for the generational game of telephone that plays out as stories change to suit the times in which they are told, or disappear altogether. There is no way to change how these people were treated in their deaths, but I can restore some respect to their humanity by uncovering their stories, separating the myths from the facts, and exploring the contexts in which such treatment of the dead could be remotely acceptable.
During the early stages of our collaboration, other schools who heard about Harvard’s results contacted Kirby about testing their alleged anthropodermic books. Juniata College in Pennsylvania submitted a book full of seventeenth-century law tracts called Bibliotheca politica, which was proven by PMF to be sheepskin. A chemist there named Richard Hark was intrigued by the process and results. He decided he wanted to work with Kirby as well. Then Kirby communicated with the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia’s curator Anna Dhody, who was eager to test those alleged human skin objects I had encountered in the glass case years before. Kirby’s PMF results confirmed that all five books were real human skin. This gives the Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia the bizarre distinction (among many others that they no doubt hold) of being home to the largest confirmed collection of anthropodermic books in the world.*
As the test results roll in, the Anthropodermic Book Project has established that from the known alleged cases, the number of true anthropodermic bibliopegy examples have just slightly edged out the fakes. The most prevalent commonality among these diverse human skin books is that, when the binding was created, there was almost always a doctor wielding the knife. I decided that to understand these books’ real history, I needed to start at the beginning of their rumored existence and the inception of clinical medicine itself.
Copyright © 2020 by Megan Rosenbloom